Keynote Speakers

Prof. Günter Dux, Freiburg University
"Piaget and History - the role of cognitive adult development as a driving force of the history of humankind."
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Günter Dux (born in 1933), is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Freiburg, Germany. His major innovation has been the Piaget-based "historico-genetic theory of culture”. After a career in law (PhD in 1962), he turned to sociology and philosophy. In 1973 he was appointed professor of sociology at the University of Linz (Austria). From 1974-1997 he was a professor of sociology at the University of Freiburg, and also director of its Institute of Sociology. In 1995 he was appointed Leibniz-professor at the University of Leipzig. In 1997/98 he was director of the research group on the theory of social change at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at the University of Bielefeld. Dux’s historico-genetic theory of culture is the result of his about 30 years of theoretical and empirical research. Based on the Piaget’s theory of structural cognitive development, Dux’s work focuses on the fundamental links between ontogenetic and historical thought and reconstructs human history from them. Dux has spent many years of fieldwork trying to test and validate Piaget’s findings on adult cognition in different cultural contexts. He has analyzed its social and historical foundations and implications by comparing findings of non-Western societies (as India, Latin America and Indonesia) with data from Western contexts. His theory has been acknowledged as one of the few ambitious and ground-breaking sociological grand theories, besides Habermas’ “theory of communicative action” and Luhmann’s “systems theory”. See more information of Prof. Dux at his website >>>


Professor Erik J. van Possum, Twente University, & Rebecca Hamer, Ph.D., IB, The Hague
"Changing ways of knowing in higher education – educational psychology’s viewpoint."

"Our work is grounded in longitudinal epistemological development approaches, and goes back to William Perry (I worked with him around 1985), Marcia Magolda (worked with her the first decade of this century), Ference Marton and Roger Saljo (I know them for more than 30 years now and they inspired me to start with phenomenography/qualitative research). Other sources of inspiration have been Robert Kegan (1994), Belenky et al. (wrote the very inspiring ‘Women's Ways of Knowing’ in the eighties) and Deanna Kuhn (‘Skills of Argument’).

"Our work is an example of the Grounded Theory approach in qualitative research. Starting with data collection, we build preliminary models of people's conceptions of all kinds of important educational phenomena and by continued data collection/model building we hope to arrive at the 'definitive' model of e.g. conceptions of learning. There are six levels at the moment, representative for people in higher education. Very relevant for the ESRAD conference is that these conceptions can be ordered in terms of increasing complexity of thinking about the studied phenomenon, and so we see these conceptions as orders of consciousness of increasing complexity or as different epistemological ecologies. We wrote about all this in our book ‘The Meaning of Learning and Knowing’ (2010, Erik Jan van Rossum & Rebecca Hamer; book review in the "Higher Education", July 2012 by John Richardson). Rebecca will join me to the conference and take part in the keynote.

"Prof. Rossum studied Experimental Psychology and Educational Psychology in Leiden (Netherlands). Later, he became the educational advisor of the Institute of Hospitality Management The Hague (higher education) and currently he works, for some years already, in Enschede (UT, Netherlands) as an assistant professor in qualitative research. See http://www.utwente.nl/gw/omd/en/employees/employees/vanRossum.doc/ . Dr. Hamer has a teacher's degree in Chemistry and Physics followed by a master degree in Research Psychology from Leiden University. In 2012, Dr. Hamer joined the International Baccalaureate as Manager for R&D and Assessment, where she advises on curriculum development regarding improving assessment. Her areas of interest within the IB include the assessment of higher order thinking skills, conceptual understanding and interdisciplinary transfer of knowledge. In our book (see above) we use our learning conceptions model to study the longitudinal epistemological development of students as they progress through their years in higher education: do their levels of thinking become more complex and sophisticated through the years because of the nature of higher education? We also studied teachers' conceptions of e.g. learning, to see for example what happens when there are frictions between students' and teachers' conceptions."

The PP presentation can be found here >>>